Service 05 — Repair

Repair and remanufacturing: broken boards out, recovered boards in.

The cheapest pallet in the world is the one you already own with a new deck board on it. Repair is where recycling stops being a waste service and starts being manufacturing.

View into a loaded trailer stacked to the roof with wood pallets, rear doors open to blue sky — LoadedAbout 330 units, two high, roughly 15,000 lb in a trailer rated for three times that. Pallet loads cube out long before they gross out.

Price a repair program

Give us the quantity, the size and the ZIP. You'll get a written quote with the grade, the freight and the pickup window — not a sales call.

Written quotes, usually inside one business day
Loads from 100 pallets to full 53' trailers
We buy as readily as we sell — tell us which way it flows

First name *

Last name *

Email *

We reply by email, so this needs to be a working address.

Phone *

US or Canadian 10-digit number. Formats itself as you type.

Company

City

State / Province

Two-letter code or full name.

Postal code *

US ZIP (43217) or Canadian postal code (K1A 0B1).

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Quantity *

Whole units, digits only.

Grade

Message

No phone number required from us — we quote by email so you have the numbers in writing.

Warehouse aisle lined on both sides with tall stacks of used wood pallets on a polished concrete floor, roof lights overhead

Inside the building

The sort aisle at half past seven. Graded stock on the left, waiting to be worked on the right.

Repair, properly done

What separates a repair from a bodge.

There is a version of pallet repair that involves nailing a short board across a break and calling it fixed. It passes a glance, fails a rack, and eventually drops product on a floor.

A proper repair replaces the full member. A broken deck board comes off entirely and is replaced with a full-length board of the same nominal thickness and a compatible species group. A cracked stringer either gets a full-length companion stringer glued and nailed along its face, or the unit gets dismantled — there is no third option that we consider acceptable.

Every repaired unit is re-graded after the fact, against the same published standard we use for everything else. A repaired pallet does not automatically come back as a Grade A; it comes back as whatever it now is.

Full-member replacement only — no short splices across a break
Companion stringers glued and nailed full length, or the unit is dismantled
Same nominal thickness and compatible species group on every replacement
Re-graded after repair, not before
ISPM-15 units repaired only with heat-treated lumber, and re-stamped

Repaired to Grade A

The economics

When to repair, and when to stop

The decision is not sentimental. Past a certain damage level, repair costs more than the residual value of the unit.

Damage	Repair cost	Decision	Why
One broken deck board	$1.75 – $2.25	Repair	Twenty minutes of a dismantler's time against a $9 unit
Two or three deck boards	$2.50 – $3.50	Repair	Still well under half the replacement cost
Cracked stringer, one	$2.75 – $3.75	Repair with companion	Structurally sound if done full length
Two or more cracked stringers	—	Dismantle	Repair cost exceeds unit value; the lumber is worth more
Wet or mouldy	—	Grind	Cannot be dried economically; grade is gone
Wrong footprint entirely	$3.50 – $6.00	Remanufacture	Cut down to a standard size and rebuilt

Remanufacturing

Turning an orphan size into something you can actually buy again

Remanufacturing is the deeper operation. A 52×42 unit that nobody stocks gets cut down to a 48×40 GMA footprint, rebuilt with recovered boards and re-decked. What arrives as an unsellable orphan leaves as the most liquid pallet in North America.

It is the right answer when you have inherited a footprint you no longer want — after an acquisition, a line change, or a customer switching their racking. Rather than scrapping the fleet, we convert it. The unit weight comes down slightly, the deck pattern is usually 5 boards rather than 7, and the load rating lands in Grade B territory, which we will tell you before you commit.

For anyone considering the opposite move — going custom rather than standard — read the custom sizing guide first. Non-standard footprints are a long-term cost that most operations underestimate.

Repair programs

Three ways customers use this

01Closed-loop repairYour pallets, your fleet. We collect damaged units, repair them and return the same population to you. Useful when the footprint is unusual or the pallets are branded.
02ExchangeYou send damaged units and receive an equivalent count of graded, ready-to-use stock immediately, with the repair happening on our clock instead of yours. Faster, marginally more expensive.
03Buy-repair-sellWe buy your damaged units outright, repair them, and sell them into the general market. Simplest arrangement; you take cash and walk away.

Questions

Repair questions

How many times can a pallet be repaired?

A well-built 48×40 GMA hardwood pallet typically survives five to eight service cycles with two or three repairs along the way before the nail holes stop holding and the unit goes to dismantling. Softwood and lighter-build units manage fewer.

Will a repaired pallet still be ISPM-15 compliant?

Only if the replacement lumber was itself heat-treated and the unit is re-marked correctly. This is one of the most common causes of held export shipments. We handle it properly, and we explain the rules in ISPM-15 explained.

Do repairs use new lumber?

Wherever the specification allows, no — we use lumber recovered from dismantled pallets, which is both cheaper and dramatically lower-carbon. Where a spec demands new material, we use new material and say so on the invoice.

Can you repair block and Euro pallets?

Yes, though EPAL-certified units carry their own repair rules, and a repair performed outside that scheme means the pallet can no longer travel as certified EPAL. We will always tell you before we touch one.

Repair standards

What we will and will not do to a damaged unit

Published so you can hold us to it, and so you can ask another yard the same questions.

Situation	Our standard	Common alternative	Why it matters
Broken top deck board	Full-length replacement, matched thickness	Short board nailed across the break	A butted joint is a hinge under concentrated load
Cracked stringer	Full-length companion, glued and nailed	Short cleat over the crack	Bending stress is highest at mid-span, exactly where the cleat ends
Two cracked stringers	Dismantle — no repair	Repair both and sell on	Repair cost exceeds unit value and the result is unpredictable
Missing bottom board	Replace full length	Leave it	Bottom deck coverage governs racked capacity
Protruding fasteners	Set or remove every one	Ignore	Punctures film, cases and occasionally product
ISPM-15 marked unit	Treated lumber only, then re-mark	Repair with any lumber	This is the most common export compliance failure there is
Out of square by >¼″	Re-square or downgrade	Ship it	Out-of-square units are what jam racking

Running a repair loop

How a fleet stays alive instead of being replaced

Pull damaged units out before they fail, not after. The expensive version of pallet damage is discovering it when a load is already on a forklift. A five-second check at the point where empties are staged catches most of it and costs nothing.

Stage damaged units separately. A marked area, however small. Damaged pallets that go back into the good stack come out again as a product damage claim two months later.

Collect on a schedule rather than when the pile is embarrassing. Repair capacity is planned; a sudden trailer of damaged units competes with everyone else's booked work.

Decide your replacement threshold once and write it down. Two cracked stringers, or wet, or wrong footprint — those go to dismantling. Everything else is worth a look. Without a written rule, the threshold moves with whoever is on shift.

Track the repair rate. If the proportion of your fleet needing repair each year is climbing, something upstream changed: a new carrier, a new racking configuration, a new forklift operator. The pallets are telling you something.

What a repair buys

The numbers behind the decision

$2.75

Typical repair cost

Deck board replacement with recovered lumber.

3–5

Further cycles bought

Not a reset — the other members are the same age.

40%

Repaired with same-day lumber

Recovered from units dismantled that morning.

Maximum service cycles

For a well-built hardwood GMA, with repairs along the way.